Finding the Sex in Sexual Harassment: How Title VII and Tort Schemes Miss the Point of Same-Sex Hostile Environment Harassment

It has been nearly a quarter century since the United States Supreme Court first recognized the cause of action for a sexually hostile work environment under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, the Court essentially adopted the view offered by legal academician Catharine MacKinnon that harassment taking the form of a sexually hostile work environment is a manifestation of gender-based power. In so doing, the Court created a remedy for many aggrieved employees, permitting redress in the federal courts for a problem that makes many workplaces unbearable. At the same time, however by adopting MacKinnon\u27s theory of sexual violence, the Court virtually ensured that a different class of plaintiffs-- victims of anti-gay hostile work environments-- would be denied relief. While some analysts trace this inequity to a conflicting array of judicial doctrine, this Article claims that its source runs much deeper: to courts\u27 misguided understanding of the nature of sexual harassment itself Although much of the history of sexual harassment doctrine indicates courts\u27 primary concern with determining the motivation behind incidents of harassment, hostile environments that take the form of sexual harassment cannot be explained as the simple expression of either sexual desire or gender-specific hatred. Thus, courts\u27 reliance upon a binary conception of sexuality results in a fundamentally flawed jurisprudence. The Article concludes by offering an alternative theory of sexual harassment highlighting the independently sexual dimension of the behavior and argues that, because the nature of sexual expression itself is highly ambivalent and fluid, courts are ill-equipped to investigate the motivations underlying workplace interactions that take a sexual form

Passions We Like… and Those We Don\u27t: Anti-Gay Hate Crime Laws and the Discursive Construction of Sex, Gender, and the Body

This Article proceeds as follows. In Part II, the author catalogs the history of anti-gay hate crime laws in the United States, describing the rapid spread of state-level laws extending race- and religion-based hate crime laws to LGB people. The Article also provides an overview of federal legislation addressing anti-gay hate crime. In Part III, it examines the policy environment within which anti-gay hate crime laws have been, and continue to be, considered. Specifically, the jurisprudential frameworks that shape, define, and constrain discourses of equality, rights, and social identity are analyzed. The argument is made that the policy environment of antigay hate crime law has created a set of intractable discursive problems for advocates of anti-gay hate crime laws. Such laws\u27 emphasis upon status categories in defining the harm, and the causation scheme implicated by hate crime tracking mechanisms and sentence enhancements, serves to undermine LGB discourses of equality and sexual freedom, and reinscribes binary conceptions of sex, gender, and embodied desire. In Part IV, the justificatory discourses embedded within the drive to enact and extend anti-gay hate crime laws are unpacked. The author demonstrates that utilitarian, expressivist, and retributivist discourses circulate in troubling ways throughout the anti-gay hate crime debate. Such justificatory narratives betray a fundamental ambivalence about the nature of sexuality, identity, and desire and, as a result, open the door to juridical investigations into, and evaluations of, different manifestations of passion. The author argues in Part V that sexual progressives ought to be suspicious of such investigations in part because they create the discursive space within which anti-gay discourses- such as that which authorizes the so-called homosexual panic defense -flourish. The Article is concluded in Part VI by considering the implications of the analysis of anti-gay hate crime laws for LGB advocacy generally

Laziness or liberation? Labor market policies and workers' attitudes toward employment flexibility

This study examined the relationship between labor market policies and employees' willingness to make concessions in order to avoid unemployment. In contrast to previous work that analyzed the behavior of employers and the unemployed, we examined how labor market policies influence employees' flexibility. Multilevel modeling techniques were applied to a data set that was created by combining individual-level data from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) with country-level information from the Organization for Cooperation and Economic Development. The main findings of our analyses were that dismissal protection and unemployment benefits do make a difference to employees' willingness to make concessions, and that the relationships between the willingness to make concessions and labor market policies are nonlinear. Substantively, these nonlinear relationships suggest that employees' willingness to be flexible is negatively associated with both "too much" and "too little" social protection

Passions We Like… and Those We Don\u27t: Anti-Gay Hate Crime Laws and the Discursive Construction of Sex, Gender, and the Body

This Article proceeds as follows. In Part II, the author catalogs the history of anti-gay hate crime laws in the United States, describing the rapid spread of state-level laws extending race- and religion-based hate crime laws to LGB people. The Article also provides an overview of federal legislation addressing anti-gay hate crime. In Part III, it examines the policy environment within which anti-gay hate crime laws have been, and continue to be, considered. Specifically, the jurisprudential frameworks that shape, define, and constrain discourses of equality, rights, and social identity are analyzed. The argument is made that the policy environment of antigay hate crime law has created a set of intractable discursive problems for advocates of anti-gay hate crime laws. Such laws\u27 emphasis upon status categories in defining the harm, and the causation scheme implicated by hate crime tracking mechanisms and sentence enhancements, serves to undermine LGB discourses of equality and sexual freedom, and reinscribes binary conceptions of sex, gender, and embodied desire. In Part IV, the justificatory discourses embedded within the drive to enact and extend anti-gay hate crime laws are unpacked. The author demonstrates that utilitarian, expressivist, and retributivist discourses circulate in troubling ways throughout the anti-gay hate crime debate. Such justificatory narratives betray a fundamental ambivalence about the nature of sexuality, identity, and desire and, as a result, open the door to juridical investigations into, and evaluations of, different manifestations of passion. The author argues in Part V that sexual progressives ought to be suspicious of such investigations in part because they create the discursive space within which anti-gay discourses- such as that which authorizes the so-called homosexual panic defense -flourish. The Article is concluded in Part VI by considering the implications of the analysis of anti-gay hate crime laws for LGB advocacy generally